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Susan Collins won re-election with 61% of the vote during the 2008 GOP mass-extinction election. John McCain, the top of their ticket, trailed her in Maine by 21 points

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Interesting thing about this Young Washington movie is that every single aspect of it is dull and uninspiring except for the lead actor, the semi-unknown William Franklyn-Miller, who is actually kinda cooking

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alex @yourfavalex.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

People like Michael Tracey seem to think it lends great credibility to their project that every 90 days or so they have a very public mental breakdown.

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⬆️ Saul Bellow. The Bellarosa Connection. 1989.

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alex @yourfavalex.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

“One can think of such things—and think and think—but nothing is resolved by these historical meditations. To think doesn’t settle anything. No idea is more than an imaginary potency, a Los Alamos mushroom cloud (destroying nothing, making nothing) rising from blinding consciousness.”

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alex @yourfavalex.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

“How was it that the accumulated gripes of all the ages took off so when transplanted to America?” Saul Bellow. A Silver Dish. 1978.

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alex @yourfavalex.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The main point is always clear to the layman

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alex @yourfavalex.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

"He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended to the destinies of the quick." Vladimir Nabokov. Pnin. 1957.

Referring to the Harvard stop on the T as “a stop in Cambridge”

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Alfred Stieglitz. Self-Portrait. 1907.

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"Fantasy is a staple in Hollywood, and its Communists lived their fantasy at once more acutely and more comfortably than any group of their comrades anywhere else in America." Murray Kempton. Part of Our Time. 1955.

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I wonder if the popularity of Bushisms gave it one last jolt before free fall

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I don't think there's anything cathartic about trump's voters turning on him after they voted for him three times. If anything, they're probably sure he isn't running again and they need a new object to focus their bottomless rage on

After a steady rise and peaks in 1976 and 2006, the word "irregardless" is cratering in public use.

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These two albums are speaking to eachother this morning

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alex @yourfavalex.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

“Dying dreams sometimes last longest in hearts they have broken; hate can be the strongest of memories. That may be why so much of whatever pain & passion is left to the myth of the 30s is carried by its lost lovers, its apostates, & its armed disenchanted.” Murray Kempton. Part of Our Time. 1955.

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"Maimed creatures can alone breathe in Henry James's pages maimed yet specialized. They remind one of the exquisite deformities who haunted Egyptian art in the reign of Akhenato —huge heads and tiny legs, but nevertheless charming. In the following reign they disappear."

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alex @yourfavalex.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

"Melville—after the initial roughness of his realism—reaches straight back into the universal, to a blackness and sadness so transcending our own that they are undistinguishable from glory" E. M. Forster. Aspects of the Novel. 1927.

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alex @yourfavalex.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Private companies, even when they're dress up as places of higher learning, will flatten every trace of culture in favor of cheap and disposable kitsch.

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Just told cosmopolitan I’m not bothered by the criticisms swirling around me. Anxious to hear their response 👀

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Kempton wrote that about The Globe's coverage of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial btw

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This gawking bacanal over the western mass gay bar that the Globe kicked off reminds me of Murray Kempton's old saw: "Boston journalism has always been devout in enlarging the routine into the sensational."

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the facebook marketplace team must be a real black sheep at meta since they're the only ones at the company that do something of value

alex @yourfavalex.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I think it's worth considering that many have actually heard "Choosin’ Texas" and then forgot they did

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alex @yourfavalex.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Interested to see how the new PBS nyc documentary covers the Atlantic Terminal Target opening

alex @yourfavalex.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I will say ever since I turned 35 I don't feel like I'm carrying myself like I'm eligible to be president

alex @yourfavalex.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

damn, I know Max Eastman turned away from the left but did he really have to give Buckley's "God and Man at Yale" a glowing review?

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this feels like a formalizing of Kitsch in the way the MoMA was for the Avant-garde. A sign of exhaustion of the form, a premature tombstone

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Disneyland Paris is a reverse Norman Conquest

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Theo van Doesburg. Card Players. 1917.

alex @yourfavalex.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Nicolaes Pickenoy. Portrait of a Young Woman. 1632

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James McNeill Whistler. Harmony in Blue and Silver: Trouville. 1865.

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alex @yourfavalex.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

"The final test of a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define" E.M. Forster. Aspects of the Novel. 1927.

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alex @yourfavalex.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Even though it was written 650 years ago, Ibn Khaldûn's Kitāb al-ʻIbar has never had a complete English translation. There are still many gaps in the world's discourse 😞

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alex @yourfavalex.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Great, interrogative piece on Fiedler. I enjoyed his book well enough, but I rarely think about it. I found his essays to be flat and reactive, with a lot of bravura to cover cracks in their foundations. A fun but marginal thinker on American lit thebaffler.com/outbursts/it...

thebaffler.com

It’s a Boy’s Boy’s Boy’s World | Zoë Hu

Can American fiction ever escape the high-low conundrum disparaged by scholar and critic Leslie Fiedler?